Kiss Me Again by Rachel Vail

of the cabinet, and whether I had anything funny I could post on Tess’s wall.
    Samantha said, “I can’t figure it out.”
    “Ah. My plan is complex,” I said with as much drama as possible. “Try to stay with me here.”
    She nodded, her eyes lasers on the board.
    “I was thinking, Hmm. I haven’t moved the horsie in a while. So I moved it.”
    “The knight?”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Really?”
    “Sorry. Your stepsister is kind of an idiot.”
    She jolted upright, startled.
    “What?” I asked.
    “My whole entire life I wished for a sister,” she whispered. “My entire life.”
    “Me too,” I said, not knowing if that was true or not, before that moment, when it irrevocably was.
    She started to smile a bit, but pulled it down, turning her eyes to the board again. She moved, I moved, she moved and said, “Mate.”
    I held out my hand again. “Good game.”
    “Good game,” she said, shaking on it. “You shouldn’t say nasty things about people. Even yourself. That’s what my mom says.”
    I watched her put the pieces away carefully into their little plastic bags. “She’s right, your mom. She’s smart.”
    “Kevin hates her.”
    “No, I’m sure he doesn’t.”
    “He does,” Samantha said solemnly. “Because she left.”
    I nodded.
    Samantha zipped up the canvas bag. “I don’t hate her,” Sam said. “I wish Kevin didn’t. Do you hate your dad?”
    “I don’t know. I was really mad at him for a while. I don’t really remember, but supposedly I wouldn’t even look at him. It’s like the one thing he and my mom agree about—how mad I was. And it took me years before I could even say hello to his girlfriend, who’s now his wife. I just flat-out hated her. Maybe I still do. But I guess I don’t hate him. Usually. And probably Kevin doesn’t really hate your mom.”
    “He does,” Samantha said. “Your dad got a girlfriend while he was married to your mom?”
    “Yeah,” I said, surprised by the catch in my throat. I didn’t care anymore about that. Not really. I didn’t think I cared, anyway. “Is that what happened with your parents, too?”
    “No,” Samantha said. I waited, but that was it.
    “Mmm,” I said.
    She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know. They just stopped loving each other, I guess.”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s my bedtime.” She stood up and extended her hand to shake again. “Thank you for playing with me, Charlie.”
    I stood up, too. “Your dad didn’t notice the time yet,” I said. “I could make us ice-cream sundaes, and we could gossip or something.”
    She hesitated. She definitely hesitated before she said, “No, I have to go to bed now.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Charlie?”
    “Mmm-hmm?”
    “Do you ever see swirly colors at the sides of your eyes?”
    “No,” I said. “Why?”
    “Just wondering. I might be a mathematician when I grow up, or else a rock star.”
    “You’d be great as either,” I told her.
    “Thanks.”
    I stood alone in my living room and watched her drift upstairs in her clunky Uggs. I listened to her footsteps across the creaky hall.
    With nothing left to do, I went up a few minutes later and wrote my Hamlet essay while listening to music with my earbuds in. I must have drifted off to sleep, because a while later, I thought Laertes was knocking at my door, but no, it was Kevin, in the ghostly hallway light, leaning against my door frame.

seventeen
    STANDING THERE, SO still and back-lit, he looked like one of the moody photographs hanging in the hall come to life, as if the image had clambered out of the frame and wandered to my room.
    I sat up and took off my earbuds, pulled them out of my computer, and shut it. He hadn’t budged.
    “Couldn’t sleep?” I whispered.
    He shook his head.
    “I have to … I have to go to the bathroom.”
    “I’ll wait for you in my room?” he whispered. “I need to talk to you. Okay?”
    “Okay,” I answered, and lowered my head. I couldn’t meet his intense eyes; it made me